Consciousness: the problem haunting materialism
There is a question haunting the sciences: how is it that conscious experience emerges out of physical matter? How do we come to possess this ineffable feeling of what it is to be alive in a body, assailed by information from the senses, our minds crackling with thought, memories, dreams, and perceptions? And why does being conscious feel like anything at all?
While you might be fooled into thinking that these are rather simple questions, the devil is in the detail. The sense of being alive, of living in a body, of experiencing sensory information is as near a miracle we might get in this disenchanted age. So much so that the dreamier of our popular scientists like to reflect on the implausibility of human consciousness: how is it that such a beautifully complex phenomena has emerged from the relatively simple engine of evolution? How did life start from microorganisms feeding on hydrothermal vents, only to result billions of years later, in Slavoj Žižek?
While we once believed that the Earth (and by extension human life) was the center of the universe, astronomy has presented us with a rather more humble picture. The deeper we’ve delved into the mysteries of the cosmos, the more we’ve had to face up to the fact that our pale blue dot is an infinitesimally small mote — which, relatively speaking, is getting smaller over time.
